Katherine Mansfield and Cosmopolitanis - Assignment Example

 Katherine Mansfield and Cosmopolitanism There has been a renewed interest in recent years in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, an acclaimed modernist writer of New Zealand birth, who migrated to England at the age of 19 and never returned to her native country thereafter. Her work was appreciated during her lifetime and since her early death has attracted the interest of many scholars due to the revolutionary style Mansfield employed. She is best known for the fact that her stories had no plot but were instead made up of seemingly disjointed fragments, which nevertheless produced a startling, total. Theoretically, Mansfield has been linked to impressionist elements within Literary Modernism, a movement to which she was an immensely influential contributor. Mansfield’s work is characterised by ‘thinking and sensing, believing and suspecting’, rather than by ‘standard perceptual distinctions’ (Matz, J., in Bradshaw, K. J., & Dettmar, H., 2001, p. 206), and displays a passion for the most intricate detail “as if it was written in acid’ (Smith, A., 2008, in Centenary Mansfield Conference in 2008). This form enabled her to portray complex emotions without ever being explicit and to “speak to the secret self we all have” (Smith, A., introduction to Mansfield p. xxi). Thus, it is left to the reader to capture whatever meaning may be found, especially in the presence of the portrayal of several, often contradictory, emotions. Mansfield herself was an extremely complex person, restless and dissatisfied, always rejecting what was there and ‘escaping’ to the next experience, forever searching. Throughout her life she is claimed to have suffered a sense of isolation and displacement, which, together with a turbulent personal life, has left its mark on her stories. Different emphasis has been given to these elements by scholars who have interpreted Mansfield’s work, from the impact of her relationship to Henri Bergson & Virginia Woolf on her work, to the role of women in society and the “modernist Moment of Being’, to name just a few (Nakano, N.; Manhire, V; Hardin, B.; Paccaud-Huguet, J. in ‘Centenary Mansfield Conference in 2008’). More recently O’Sullivan has also argued, that “an exchange of perspectives” between Europe and colonial New Zealand is fundamental 1to Mansfield’s writing’ (Brown & Gupta, p. 83), although in works of ‘Mansfield complexity’, perhaps such perspectives may be anything but ‘fundamental’. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Mansfield’s early stories were strongly influenced by her rejection of her family’s bourgeois lifestyle and the provincial New Zealand society, as a consequence of her brilliant three years in London, during which she became deeply enamoured with the intellectual brilliance of Oscar Wilde, Pater and the French symbolist Beaudelaire. Juliet, one of her early stories, is a clear reflection of this new expectation of what society should be like. There, clearly, an English ‘perspective’ is applied to a colonial society. Later stories however, although equally critical of New Zealand, English, French and German society, are so in much more subtle and sophisticated, ‘cosmopolitan’ kind of ways, according to Robinson (1994, p. 5 in Baldt, E., 2010), rather more from the viewpoint of a world citizen. This also sits more comfortably with the many other aspects, that are important to Mansfield and which she takes up prominently in her stories, particularly the cause of women in patriarchies, isolation and loneliness and, of course, there is almost always the disastrous event that shatters illusion. After all, Mansfield was intensely pre-occupied with social criticism, with teasing out the undercurrents in ordinary situations and with life as it is lived by families, amidst love, hate, apathy, despair, loneliness and self-deception. Much has been made of Mansfield’s social criticism of New Zealand, claiming it to be informed by Continental perspectives, and some of her more scathing commentary on the shallowness and snobbery of European society by the mentality of a New Zealander. Such an assumption leaves many questions unanswered, with huge question marks remaining over the kind of understanding of ‘national psyche’ a 14 years old girl could possibly have taken with her when she left New Zealand for a three year stay in England. Thereafter, her remainder of her formative years were spent outside of her country of birth, except for 18 months’, and so was the rest of her life. Under the circumstances, it seems reasonable to assume that the nostalgia for New Zealand she clearly felt in the years before her death was prompted by personal tragedy rather than by a deep appreciation of the fabric of New Zealand society. This can only lead to the conclusion that Katherine Mansfield was influenced by many things and that she drew on the total of her experiences to pursue a much larger agenda of social criticism and literary experimentation – a truly cosmopolitan citizen (Robinson, op. cit.). Thus she uses an Englishman to deliver her stinging criticism on a pompous German middle class society in Germans at Meat; a spinster of unknown English-speaking background to illustrate the cruel crimes life and (in this case) French society commits against older people in Miss Brill; the Frenchman Duquette to rail against corruption – here perpetrated by a servant - in Je ne parle pas francais and New Zealand women to mount a critique on the way in which women perpetuate their own patriarchal domination in At the Bay. One of these stories, Miss Brill, has been chosen for a more in-depth analysis of Mansfield’s concerns and to discuss O’Sullivan’s claim. In addition, Mr & Mrs Dove has also been selected, given that Reggie is a ‘colonial’, courting an English girl and thus allowing speculation about the approach to this essay Mansfield may have taken. Miss Brill is important here because this story contains elements that lend themselves to some extent to both kinds of interpretations. Both cosmopolitanism (the way Robinson understands it) and colonialism can bring with it isolation and displacement, which are clearly prominent in Miss Brill, “but the light flickers as the object is seen from different angles, and no two readers interpret it the same way.” (Smith, A., 2002, in Mansfield: Selected Stories p. xxiv) The story, although short, is immensely powerful, highlighting also some of Mansfield’s modernist techniques. A span of hardly two hours is covered, during which Miss Brill leaves her home for a Sunday outing and returns, after an uneventful Sunday. Or so it seems because within this jigsaw puzzle of a disjointed collection of observations, there unfolds the enormity of the woman’s displacement and isolation, her self-deception, her rejection and moment of clarity, when the fantasy threatens to collapse. Read with less sensitivity, however, the tale could be understood from the perspective of a foreigner, suffering the rejection of her French hosts. After all, Miss Brill is an expatriate in France and it is conceivable that she is rejected because she is foreign. Indeed, her origin is uncertain, with certainty existing only about the fact that she is a native speaker of English. She is likened to fried whiting later in the story – a New Zealand fish – and among Miss Brill’s rambling thoughts is the assessment of a couple she claims to be ‘English’, both wearing ugly or strange clothes. “An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she wore button boots.” (Mansfield: Selected Stories. 2002, p. 226). She does not identify them as people from ‘home’, but as ‘English”, somehow setting them apart from herself. Miss Brill could therefore without doubt have been a ‘colonial’. This is a possible interpretation, although it has been called ‘an easy assumption’ elsewhere (Smith A., 2002, xxxi) and there is a much stronger human element in this story that, if it was indeed Mansfield’s intention to sketch Miss Brill as ‘colonial’, which is by no means certain, manages to dominate the scene to an extent that renders other concerns trivial. Miss Brill is a woman of uncertain age on whose rambling thoughts Mansfield invites us to eavesdrop, having dispensed with an external narrator. This new technique is later called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ and was taken up by Virginia Woolf (Kaplan, E., 1991, p.3 in Brown, R. D. & Gupta, S. 2005, P.71). From this stream, the reader learns the full extent of the fantasy world in which Miss Brill lives. Like a scriptwriter, Miss Brill writes the lines for all the participants in this play she constructs – at first unknowingly. Later the revelation strikes her that she is indeed part of an elaborate play that is enacted every Sunday and that requires her to be present – attesting to her importance, moving her to tears: “…they would begin, and the men’s voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches – they would come in with a kind of accompaniment…something so beautiful- moving…” (Mansfield, op. cit. p. 228). This scene Mansfield has constructed is marvellously complex, with sub-layers of characters that each add seemingly unconnected elements of decay, such as the woman in ermine: “Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw.” (Mansfield, op. cit. p. 227) and “There is something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even – event cupboards!” (Mansfield, op. cit. p. 226) But all together, these fragmented elements, in a story without a plot, paint a vivid and pathetic picture of the life of women, if they do not (or cannot) live under the protection of a patriarch – similar to the ‘ermine’. Miss Brill might be ignorant of the sordid activities of the ‘faded’ woman, but ‘we know’, because Mansfield wants us to know that there is no way out for women. But then Miss Brill’s silent song of exultation is interrupted, and the fragile illusion of community and being wanted is shattered by the cruel remarks of a young man, “why does she come here at all…” (Mansfield, op. cit. p. 229) For a few moments Miss Brill’s fantasy is pierced by reality, before she manages to drag a curtain over what may be too painful to endure, making it possible for her to project the pain outside, and “she heard someone crying” (Mansfield, op. cit., p. 229) while she restores the ‘little rogue’, with his nose worn by age, to his mothballs. Given the complexity of the issues Mansfield tackles in this story, there seems to be little or no call to look for either a New Zealander or a European perspective, given that isolation, deprivation, rejection and the struggle against determinism in the lives of females is, if anything, universal. The second story belongs to Mr & Mrs Dove, the story of Reginald and Anne. Reginald is a Rhodesian farmer, with few prospects, who has fallen in love with Anne, and although Reggie is English also, the social gap between him and the object of his desire is enormous. When he visits Anne on the last day before his departure, things do not go as planned and Anne rejects his “queer, timid longing to have the chance of looking after her, of making it his job to see that she had everything she wanted, and that nothing came near her that wasn't perfect”. (Mansfield, op. cit. page 258) There is a strange, a-sexual quality about Reggie’s description of his feelings, re-enforced by the ‘snipping’ sound of the scissors. A son emasculated by the mother, offering all that is left to the woman of his choice – who laughs. Not just then, but every time they meet but it seems neither of them know why. When Reginald proposes, Anne refuses because she couldn’t love him, “no, never in that way”, she said and showed him the doves, where “away she runs, and after her,' cried Anne, and she sat back on her heels, 'comes poor Mr. Dove, bowing and bowing . . . and that's their whole life. They never do anything else, you know.' (Mansfield, op. cit. page 260) The story is, as most of Mansfield’s later work, written in modernist style, does not have a plot and offers no solution. The literary style alternates between ‘stream-of-consciousness’, dialogue and the voice of a narrator. By calling Reginald back, after he has departed, there is a hint that the ‘endless and useless’ circle of running away and chasing may already have commenced. There is, however, no sign that Mansfield is ‘fundamentally’ influenced by an exchange of European and New Zealand perspectives. If she is, she has here missed a major chance to exploit the class issue, which Reginald is clearly offering up at the beginning of the story, when he takes stock of the differences between them. He is going to ask her to marry him although he is only “making between £500 and £600 a year on a fruit farm in - of all places – Rhodesia. No capital. Not a penny coming to him…and in spite of her position, her father's wealth”. (Mansfield, p. 262) From the more detailed analysis of two of Mansfield’s stories and from more general reading of her works it seems clear that an exchange of New Zealand and European perspectives may well take place in relation to certain stories but that in general Mansfield is more concerned with larger issues and does not visibly suffer from a pre-occupation with her colonial heritage. Bibliography Baldt, E., ‘We are not solitary palm trees’: in Katherine Mansfield and Cosmopolitanism, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 1. No. Edinburgh University Press, Mansfield Studies BRADSHAW, D., & DETTMAR, K. J. H. (2005). A companion to modernist literature and culture. Blackwell companions to literature and culture, 39. Oxford: Blackwell. Brown, D. & Gupta, S. (2005). (Aestheticism & modernism: debating twentieth- century literature 1900-1960,  Abingdon: Routledge. Mansfield: Selected stories. (2002). ed. Angela Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press O'Sullivan, Vincent and Margaret Scott (1996) ed. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Volume Four: 1920. Oxford: Clarendon Press Robinson, R. (1994). ‘Introduction: In from the Margin’, in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin, ed. by Roger Robinson, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. The New Zealand Centennary Conference; The Katherine Mansfield Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, Read More